miami twice

A couple of follow-ups (follows-up, if you must) to the Lost Man's River review: firstly I alluded to it having taken quite a long time to read - just to apply some exactitude there I have that number as 63 days. The last book to take longer than that was Auto Da Fe back in 2022; looking back further there was....oh, heck, let's do a table:

Book	Pages	Completion date	Days	Pg/Day
Lost Man's River	539	19th April 2026	63	8.56
Auto Da Fe	428	13th June 2022	66	6.48
The Pope's Rhinoceros	753	6th September 2021	61	12.34
A Man In Full	742	2nd August 2018	56	13.25
The Human Stain	361	23rd December 2017	60	6.02
The Conservationist	323	22nd July 2017	67	4.82
Zeno's Conscience	437	4th December 2016	78	5.60
Midnight's Children	463	16th September 2014	91	5.09
Infinite Jest	1079	10th February 2013	96	11.24
The Name Of The Rose	502	28th June 2012	53	9.47
Sunset Song	258	12th August 2008	66	3.91

That's applying 50 days as an arbitrary cut-off threshold. Infinite Jest remains the leader here, though to be fair it is also the longest book on this entire list. Sunset Song is the shortest book to clock up over 50 days to read and as a result nabs the award for slowest read at a glacial 3.91 pages per day. I can't remember what I would have been doing to distract me from reading in summer 2008 but it was pre-kids so it was probably some carefree frolicking and spending of ample disposable income or some nonsense of that sort.

Secondly, you'll recall that Killing Mister Watson included a couple of maps at various scales showing the area where the action takes place; Lost Man's River contains what at first glance appears to be the same set of maps, but closer examination reveals some differences, reflecting the decades-later setting of the second book (later map on the right below).

Obvious differences include the Tamiami Trail linking Tampa and Miami (you see what they did there) and indeed the inclusion of Miami itself, which is labelled Lemon City on the earlier map. As far as I can gather the settlement of Miami did exist pre-1910 (the date of the Watson killing); the settlement of Lemon City is now a neighbourhood of Miami known as Little Haiti. The settlements of Homestead and Naples are also on the later map only. You might also notice that the settlement of Punta Rassa at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River has acquired a second "s" between books; I'm unclear whether this was just a mistake on the earlier map or whether it reflects some real shift in spelling over the decades.

river deep, mountain high

More exciting outdoor-adventurousness news as promised, but first a bit of scene-setting: we went on holiday to Scotland at the end of July. It's a long old drive so we stopped off on the way to visit our friends John and Tracey at their home in Silverdale, just south of the Lake District. We were only there for a day or so but did get to do a bit of exploring, in particular the spectacular coastal location at the northern end of Morecambe Bay. 

Morecambe Bay is a vast expanse of estuarial sand and mudflats and fairly notorious for its shifting landscape and dangerous tides, and most famously (in recent times anyway) for the incident where over 20 Chinese cockle-harvesters drowned in 2004. Just to demonstrate the fickle nature of the landscape, there was until recently (properly recently as in a few weeks before we were there) a vast flat expanse of sand extending out from Silverdale Cove to the main channel of the River Kent as it emerged from its mouth a couple of miles to the north, but recent heavy rain had induced a sudden course change and the river had turned south, carved out a great gouge in the sand and created a substantial sand cliff only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, which Alys and Nia kindly posed by for scale and subsequently hilariously pretended to push their little brother off.

Despite the apparent foolhardiness of attempting such a thing, guided walks are periodically available, weather and tide conditions permitting, and a person with the grand title of the Queen's Guide To The Sands (well, presumably King's Guide these days) has the job of scoping out a safe route. As publicly-accessible walking routes go it's probably not as dangerous as the Broomway in Essex - less chance of being maimed by discarded military ordnance, for instance - but definitely not to be trifled with. It is at least still passable, though, unlike the Wadeway in Chichester Harbour where you would now disappear into a canal halfway across.

Anyway, we didn't do any of that, preferring to head home for a refreshing beer and a soak in the hot tub. The following day we headed off to continue our journey north to our destination of Hunter's Quay holiday village near Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula, which I see I mentioned here. I see that I laughingly make reference to there being no point building a bridge across from the mainland (the intervening channel being basically the confluence of Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde) as it wouldn't get much use. That may be true, but more pertinently it's a couple of miles across and would therefore be a fairly major feat of engineering, not to mention one spanning a major shipping lane. Whatever, there isn't one, and so once you've got as far as Gourock (which you do by basically heading north into Glasgow and then turning left) you are obliged to queue for a ferry. Anecdotally, and I'm not saying this justifies the cost of a bridge, the ferry terminals were pretty busy in both directions when we crossed, and by no means everyone got on the first one that showed up.

Anyway, the holiday village was perfectly nice, featuring the usual chalet-slash-static-caravan accommodation and the usual array of food and drink facilities plus some entertainment for the kids. I'm always unavoidably reminded of Hi-De-Hi in places like this but it was actually perfectly nice. More importantly a) Hazel had managed to wangle a super-cheap deal for a short break and b) a shortish drive north (no ferries required this time) takes you to the north end of Loch Lomond and the vicinity of the Arrochar Alps, some of Scotland's most southerly and therefore most easily accessible Munros. Technically the most southerly Munro is Ben Lomond, but from where we started it's rather awkwardly situated on the east side of the loch, and in any case I'd been up it before, back in about 1999.

So, emboldened by everyone's conquering of a rather wet and soggy Pen y Fan for my birthday in February I devised a walk (basically this one) that would bag two Munros and offer the possibility of a crack at The Cobbler, just short of Munro height but an interesting scrambly challenge. I had mentally earmarked that last bit as very unlikely to come off, but it's good for Plan A to be ambitious as long as there's a Plan B you can fall back on. 

There's a car park by the shores of Loch Long just outside the village of Succoth, which I expect you can make up your own jokes about - you know, Elizabeth I visiting and declaring "the mountain view enchanteth most delightfully, but the neighbouring village sucketh most egregiously", that sort of thing - anyway, point is it offers a good starting point for the walk. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll have clocked that Loch Long is a sea loch, and that therefore you are going to be obliged to gain all 3000+ of those Munro feet without a head start. Moreover, if you follow the anticlockwise route I'd devised, the usual route of ascent up Beinn Narnain, the first Munro, is a relentless direct upward slog along the remains of an old cable railway, of which only a few lumps of concrete footing remain. Once you get out of the woods the relentlessness eases off a bit and it's quite pleasant, though challenging. Eventually you arrive at a pretty intimidating wall of rock which you have to find a scrambly way up to get onto the summit plateau and bag the trig point. Beinn Narnain is 926 metres or 3038 feet and (depending which list you use) is around 257th of the 280-odd Munros on the current list.

It's not the Black Cuillin, but it is far from easy - considerably more challenging than a good few of my previous Munros, and I was and am inordinately proud of the kids for giving every impression of enjoying the whole thing and seeming engaged by the idea of coming back and doing some more in future. I should also add a word for Hazel who had sustained a badly bruised ankle in a comedy incident with a shot putt at school sports day a couple of weeks earlier but clearly didn't want to let the side down and struggled up anyway. That constraint did mean that we had to abandon the idea of bagging the day's intended second Munro, Beinn Ime, which was disappointing but which I was half-expecting before we'd even set out. 

The walk out down the valley which separates Beinn Narnain from The Cobbler is a delight, as it's a pretty good path alongside a pretty river and affords excellent views of the Cobbler's knobbly profile in particular. A bit of steep zig-zagging back through the woods and you're back at the car park. After a long and strenuous walk like that a pint is very much in order and I heartily commend to you the Village Inn in Arrochar which has excellent ale from the Fyne Ales brewery. Two things to say about Fyne Ales: firstly haha, you see what they did there, and secondly I'd had them before in a pub in Edinburgh in 2011.

Anyway, the important thing here is that this was the kids' first Munro, and the first time I'd had an opportunity to add one to my list since back before we had kids. We actually did three Scottish trips with our friends Jenny and Jim and on those trips bagged four, four and zero Munros respectively, so this was actually the first one I'd been up since 2010. My personal count now stands at fifteen. 

Route map and altitude profile are below: total distance is about twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles.

Just to cap off the holiday activities, once we came to the end of our stay in Dunoon we headed back across to another quite similar holiday park just east of Edinburgh for a couple of days and spent some time doing the usual tourist-y stuff in Edinburgh including a trip down into Mary King's Close which was very interesting, and a walking tour of locations relating to JK Rowling (a former resident of Edinburgh) and the Harry Potter books. I would describe this as a commendably game attempt to get some tourist mileage out of some incredibly tenuous connections: once you've been to the site of the former cafe where she sat and wrote some of the early books you're reduced to pointing at various knobbly buildings and saying: hey, might this not have been partial inspiration for Hogwarts? Go on, squint a bit. Our tour guide was an engaging enough bloke, though, and it was pretty good fun. We didn't have time to climb Arthur's Seat but we did have time for me and Nia to have a crack at the Meadowmill parkrun on Saturday morning. Anyone fancying a bit of Scottish parkrun tourism should be aware that most if not all of the Scottish ones start at 9:30am rather than 9am. Not sure if this is a daylight thing or just a bit of bolshy being different for the sake of it.

back once again with the hill behaviour

We went for a walk up the Blorenge a couple of weeks ago; broadly similar in route and distance to the two previous walks we'd done - the slightly ill-fated (in terms of the health of my ankle and boots) lockdown one in 2021 and the one with some work colleagues all the way back in 2009. So we're not breaking any new ground here but as always there are some points of interest that are worth mentioning, and it serves as an intro to some other more significant walk stuff that we did earlier in the summer and which I'll get to in another post.

So, anyway, I don't want to rehash the content of earlier posts here but you'll recall that the Blorenge is a smallish mountain (or a largish hill, whatever you like, I'm not getting into an argument about categorisation) just outside Abergavenny, really just the steep end of the largest lobe of a sort of cloverleaf-shaped area of high ground centred just north of Blaenavon. Any walk that wants to qualify as an "ascent" in any meaningful way pretty much has to start somewhere in the vicinity of Llanfoist, and it just so happens that there's a car park at Llanfoist Crossing, at the start point of the cycle path that follows the old railway line from Llanfoist to Merthyr Tydfil along some of the bits that haven't been subsumed by the Heads Of The Valleys Road. The only drawback is that the car park is quite small and heavily used by dog walkers so it can be a bit of a bunfight finding a space. I'm not going to be That Guy and suggest you provide minor botheration to the locals by parking on a residential street as an alternative, but clearly that is a thing you could do if so inclined. 

Anyway, you're an adult, sort your own parking out. Having done that you walk up the path that goes under the old Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and then smashes straight up the hill through the woods directly towards the summit of the Blorenge. On emerging into the open you can, if you so wish, carry on straight up, but a more scenic and less lung-busting option is to take a left turn and head for the pleasant spot of the Devil's Punchbowl, a small pond in what is presumably some sort of glacial cwm. It's apparently man-made, and surprisingly recent (circa 1960s) - it was previously just a low-lying marshy area. Apparently quite a popular wild swimming spot, although when we were there the water level was quite low and it all looked a bit green and murky.

After the brief respite of the fairly flat (even slightly downhill) walk to the Devil's Punchbowl and maybe a brief respite to take in the scenery and have a drink and a KitKat (other chocolate bars are available) you turn south-west and start uphill again, briefly meeting a minor road before turning north for the proper assault on the hill. You'll notice that the path takes a slightly indirect hook-y route before approaching the summit trig point from the north-east and you might be tempted to say: hell, I'm going to cut that corner off. To that I would say: go for it if you want, but I have done it (partly by accident) and generally found it to be a bit of an arse. I mean, you won't die, but the energy and irritation expended in pathless floundering about probably means taking the main path is a better option. You do you, though.

The summit trig point is by a big pile of rocks (which obscure it until the last second coming from the north-east) and, having bagged it and dropped off the top (we went south as this happened to be the direction that got us out of the wind) for a pork pie and a Granny Smith, the walk then drops off the summit ridge to the north-west and eventually joins up with the route of Hill's Tramroad, which includes an exciting tunnel which the kids had some fun exploring and where they shot a video for Huwie's YouTube channel. That path follows the contours round the hillside until it links back with the path up through the woods which takes you back down to where you started.

I think this is the best of the three slightly different routes: the 2009 walk included an extension to loop round the Foxhunter car park and Keeper's Pond (another popular wild swimming spot), which is all very nice but doesn't really add much apart from some lateral distance, and I think the ascent via the Devil's Punchbowl is better than the route along the canal towpath and then an uphill slog along some roads. The 2021 walk took a similar route up (with a bit of inadvertent pathless floundering as described above) but then a much more direct route down, which is fine if you're in a hurry but less interesting than the route incorporating the tramroad and tunnel.

Overall route distance was just over ten kilometres, or about six-and-a-half miles. Details below: latest in the long and varied series of altitude-graph-generating tools is Strava which my Garmin running watch is linked to: this seems not to have the random starting height discrepancy that the old phone app had, which is nice. 

leaving the parc? I'm in the darc

A couple of unstructured thoughts after returning from a long weekend at Center Parcs with the family.

Firstly that "with the family" is how most people choose to go to Center Parcs; there are doubtless reasons why as a couple or small group of child-free adults you might choose to take a holiday at Center Parcs, but it's not completely clear to me what they are. That is in no way a criticism of either Center Parcs as a place or those people as people, it's just that a lot of the stuff is clearly targeted at people who have kids: the pool with its many exciting slides and rapids, the easy access to various kinds of food, the boating lake with various relatively sedate and low-speed child-friendly boat adventures. Yes, you'll be saying, but you can take the bikes and go and do lots of healthy bike stuff on your bikes. To which I would say, well, sort of. We'll come back to this.

Secondly, a word on spelling: "Center" in the American style with the "er" instead of the "re", and Parcs in the European style with the "c". These things reflect the organisation's Dutch origins, although following a split in 2001 the UK and Ireland operation is now a wholly separate organisation, though (presumably) retaining the spelling for continuity and brand recognition and stuff like that.

Center Parcs is not the only game in town when it comes to village-style experiences with centralised food and entertainment facilities, and we have previously gone (three or four times, I think) to Bluestone, which is over near Narberth in west Wales, and generally had a lovely time each time, If my records are correct the last time we were there was in December 2018, so the kids were a lot smaller then. One thing that affects is the kids' desire for more gnarly pool adventures now they're a bit older, and it must be said that the rapids at Center Parcs are a good deal more adrenaline-fuelled than anything Bluestone has to offer, as nice as the Blue Lagoon is. It should also be said that adults of adult height and weight being cajoled by their kids into traversing the rapids upwards of 30 times over the course of a long weekend will come home with a substantial collection of bruises to ankles, hips, etc. and in my case one ear filled with a lethal cocktail of earwax, pool water, cryptosporidium and child's piss which seems reluctant to unbung itself. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Anyway, more objective analyses of alternatives to Center Parcs, including Bluestone, can be found here. 

One thing I definitely can say about Bluestone is that, as lovely as cycling around the site is, it's also possible to seamlessly incorporate a trip off-site if you want to do a longer ride. I know this because we did it in 2014 as part of our first visit, when we hired a couple of bikes and one of those little trailers which we put Nia in (she'd have been two at the time).

The photo shows me and Nia heading around one of the paths at the northern edge of the resort which eventually leads up into the western end of Canaston Woods and joins the Knights Way. We did a fairly unambitious route up here, over to the bridge by Blackpool Mill and back again, with a few stops for exploring in between, all without at any point having to pass through a gate, an airlock or any other security barrier or being stopped by any sinister uniformed individuals slapping us across the face with a leather gauntlet and demanding to see our papers. The mill, by the way, was pretty much abandoned in 2014 but has since (under Bluestone's management, though it's outside the resort) been transformed into quite a ritzy-looking restaurant.

Anyway, when we planned our Center Parcs trip I noticed that the site (the first UK Center Parcs site, opened in 1987) was right next to the much larger Sherwood Pines Forest Park, a place with lots of cycle trails. Excellent, I thought, since now Nia has graduated from being a two-year-old in a trailer to a terrifyingly fit and active thirteen-year-old with her own bike, we could do with somewhere to go that offers longer rides than the Center Parcs site, which is fairly small. A quick look at an OS map shows that there is a big junction of paths right by the top left corner of the Center Parcs site; surely, you might think, an ingress/egress point for those wanting to do some longer cycling routes. Not so, as it happens, or not that we could find, anyway. Google Maps suggests that there is an egress point along the western boundary of the site but Nia and I cycled out there and had a look without finding it, and taking the route marked in red to the corner of the site doesn't yield an escape route either, there being a high fence on your left all the way round. 

The charitable view here is that this is more about keeping non-residents out than keeping residents in, especially important, one would imagine, at the Longleat site where non-residents who might want to get in include ACTUAL FREAKIN' LIONS, but there is a suspicion that it is a bit of the latter as well. Given that residents are issued with wristbands with some sort of RFID device which controls access to your lodge, swimming pool lockers etc., it's not impossible to imagine some sort of gate system controlled by the same device. Or they could just be less uptight and take the more easy-going approach that Bluestone take; don't signpost the route either internally or externally but make it available for those enterprising enough to want to take it. My personal inclination is to be irritated by cycling down a track that I expected to lead to freedom and adventure and personal autonomy and choice and be confronted with this:

In the end we found plenty to do without getting out into the wider forest area, and it is clearly physically possible to leave the site by the main entrance and loop round back into the Sherwood Pines site, albeit at the cost of 3-4 kilometres of extra distance. The whole thing is a little vexing, though, and does conjure up memories of the delightful public relations disaster that the Center Parcs organisation endured when trying to appear sufficiently reverent in the wake of the Queen's death in 2022. 

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR LODGE https://t.co/FvuMjS2HRy pic.twitter.com/YVjRaC1fcP

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 14, 2022

A couple of footnotes: firstly anyone planning a visit to Bluestone and noticing its convenient next-door proximity to the Oakwood theme park should be aware that Oakwood has now, as of earlier this year, closed down permanently.

Secondly, this trip was actually my third visit to Center Parcs (all of them to the same Sherwood Forest site), this one and our previous family visit in 2023 but also a trip waaaaaay back in what would have probably been either 1992 or 1993 with my then-girlfriend Posy and her family during the course of which this absolutely splendid photo was taken of me. 

My principal recollection of that trip is of me and Posy's younger sister's boyfriend (who I suppose would have been about 18) spending most of the week leaving the girls to do their own thing and disappearing off to the sports hall for a ferociously-competitive series of bouts of various racket sports, bouts from which I have chosen to recall I emerged triumphant.

the last book I read

Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto.

A man is dead, on a beach. Suspicious? I should bally well say so. Suicide? Yes, but how? Well, surely he simply shot himself and then hid the gun? Well, no, actually it looks as if he died by cyanide poisoning, as did the young lady found beside him. A classic lovers' suicide, then, by the look of it; an open and shut case. Well, just a minute there, you're forgetting rumpled detective Jutaro Torigai: kare wa kisoku ni shitagawanai ippikiōkami no keikandaga, kekka wa dashite iru.

The suicidal couple are quickly identified as Kenichi Sayama, an assistant section chief at a government ministry, and Hideko Kuwayama, known to everyone as Toki, a waitress at a Tokyo restaurant. So what were they doing at a beach near Fukuoka, many miles south-west of Tokyo and indeed on a whole different island?

Questioning the locals in the vicinity of the beach doesn't reveal much, apart from a couple of sightings of a couple walking in the vicinity of the local railway stations, though the timings of the sightings don't really add up properly. More information is forthcoming back in Tokyo, where it transpires that Sayama and Toki were spotted boarding the express to Fukuoka by a couple of Toki's fellow waitresses from the restaurant, in the company of one of their regular customers, prominent businessman Mr. Yasuda. Meanwhile it is revealed that the ministry that Sayama worked for was embroiled in a corruption scandal - maybe Sayama knew some inconvenient things? Could he have been rubbed out? But how could someone have engineered not only his suicide (or apparent suicide) but that of his clandestine lover as well?

Torigai and his Tokyo counterpart Kiichi Mihara start with the obvious stuff: what were the lovers doing for the few days between being sighted at the railway station in Tokyo and being found on the beach, and what do the waitresses and Mr. Yasuda know? Mihara, a diligent and slightly obsessive guy, soon comes across an oddity: Yasuda and the waitresses could only have had a clear view across the railway lines to the platform from which the express departed during a specific four-minute interval a few minutes before the departure of Yasuda's train. Is this too much of a coincidence? Could Yasuda have engineered things in some way? Was he concerned about revelations of corruption affecting some of his lucrative business dealings with the ministry?

All of this speculation is a bit pointless, though, since the actual murders (if they were murders) happened several days later and several hundred miles away, and it turns out Yasuda has a cast-iron alibi for that period, as he was in Hokkaido for a business trip, a trip also involving a lengthy rail journey from Tokyo. Or was he? Isn't just happening to be right at the far end of the country a bit too convenient? Mihara begins picking away at every aspect of Yasuda's seemingly painstakingly-constructed alibi and sees it start to unravel: no-one actually saw him on the train until a few stops from its final destination, Sapporo, the telegram he supposedly sent earlier from the train was sent by someone else, and his bed-ridden wife Ryoko just happens to be an authority on the minutiae of rail timetabling. Coincidence? OR IS IT?

Anyway, Mihara's persistence eventually cracks the case (SPOILER ALERT from here on, naturally): Yasuda really was at the beach on the night in question and then travelled to Hokkaido by plane in time to hop on the train a couple of stops from Sapporo and make it look as if he'd been on it the whole way. Not only was Ryoko - genuinely incapacitated by chronic tuberculosis, but not, as it turns out, completely bed-ridden - instrumental in concocting the railway scheduling ruse that enabled Yasuda to establish the pretence of Toki and Sayama being lovers (they knew each other, but that was it), but she also was at the beach on the night of the murders and helped her husband do the deed - in the process revenging herself on Toki whom she knew to have been actually her husband's lover, not Sayama's. Her husband's primary motive, as the detectives had already surmised, was eliminating a potential whistle-blower in the corruption investigation who might have jeopardised some lucrative business arrangements, and as a handy by-product offing an erstwhile lover whom he'd got a bit bored with.

Like most murder mysteries the solution here doesn't really stand up to being thought about too much, but the unpicking of the mystery is very satisfying. The shift in viewpoint about a third of the way through from Torigai, who you'd assumed would drive the investigation, to Mihara is a bit jarring - Torigai only popping up thereafter to exchange a couple of letters with Mihara and be the recipient of Mihara's summing-up at the end wherein it is revealed that the Yasudas conveniently offed themselves in their own lovers' suicide pact when they felt the investigative net closing in on them. The minute dissection of rail timetables may not be for everyone, but the whole thing is only 149 pages in my nice new Penguin Classics edition. The original English translations had the title Points And Lines, which I think is probably better.

Previous novels on this list to have been translated from the original Japanese are The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea and the two Murakamis, Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance.

Postscript: I meant to add that this is another book on this list to feature a map, two in this case, the first just a general map of Japan presumably included to illustrate how Tokyo is pretty much in the middle of the country and Fukuoka and Sapporo at opposite ends, and the second to make a bit of sense of the murder location and the maze of train lines that cross and intersect near there.

the last book I read

Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester.

Hong Kong? Phooey! No, really, it's true. Former British colony, business powerhouse, cultural melting pot, land of opportunity, hive of scum and villainy. And the people! Well. Let's meet some of them. 

Dawn Stone is a journalist, taking a pretty standard Glenda Slagg route through UK tabloid journalism, showbiz scandal, obsessive royal-watching and all, until an ex-colleague makes her an interesting offer: come and work for him on a new magazine he's starting up in Hong Kong. Bit of tabloidesque fluff required, naturally, but also a potential opportunity for some Proper Investigative Journalism, and, hey, maybe there's a book in it. Dawn is a bit bored of her current job, and of her current boyfriend, so she jumps at the chance.

It's all pretty fabulous at first - exciting new culture, lots of sipping gin while being whizzed around the harbour in luxury yachts, although there is a bit of shadiness about where some of the money is coming from, and how the slightly murky Wo family are pulling various strings and controlling various interests with a thin veneer of respectability but probably also involving a visit from some guys with meat cleavers if you get in their way.

After getting the go-ahead from her boss to do some digging into the local business set-up, with its murky links to the Triads, drugs and illegal gambling activities, Dawn works up an article she's pretty proud of, only for it to be made clear to her that it's going to be spiked, as the business pies that the Wos have fingers in include the magazine she's written the article for. The man delivering the message on behalf of the Wo family, Philip Oss, is very nice about it, though, and has a couple of alternative ideas for Dawn to consider: firstly a very lucrative executive position as a sort of PR person for the Wo business empire, and secondly a very lucrative SEXecutive SEX position as his mistress.

A change of viewpoint now: Tom Stewart, a simple country boy from Kent but with a restless urge to travel, sets out on a long boat journey to Hong Kong in 1935 without much clear idea of what he's going to do when he gets there. He meets a motley band of fellow travellers on the ship including Sister Maria, a Chinese nun who teaches him to speak Cantonese and who will feature intermittently but significantly in his life thereafter.

Tom is a bright, ambitious and hard-working chap and soon gets a good job at a prominent local hotel. A few years of making a nice peaceful living come to an end when World War II breaks out and the colony comes under threat of Japanese invasion. Tom's Cantonese skills make him highly valuable to the resistance effort and he slightly reluctantly becomes involved with some shady activities, until his group is inevitably betrayed and he is imprisoned by the Japanese invaders. 

Eventually the war ends, Hong Kong is liberated and Tom briefly returns to England to see his family, but soon chafes at domestic rural life and decides to return to Hong Kong permanently. He reunites with Sister Maria after some intermittent contact during the war - Maria has been helping with some translation work which has indirectly helped in the prosecution of a minor member of the Wo family, and - although it can never be proved - it is assumed, certainly by Tom, that the Wos are in some way responsible for her subsequent disappearance. 

Tom remains in Hong Kong and lives into relatively contented old age, making a nice comfortable living off the hotel. No romantic entanglements to speak of, and, well, yes, you'll be saying, that's because he was somewhat inappropriately IN LOVE with A NUN, i.e. Sister Maria, the whole time. A pity he couldn't, you know, do anything about it, but that's life. Hardest game in the world, the old nunning game. Well hold onto your wimples, because while Tom is having a grumpy-old-man-style altercation with some surly youths at a taxi rank a young man approaches him, sees off the youths with a spot of the old kung fu, and introduces himself as Tom's grandson. 

The young man, whose viewpoint we now switch to, goes by the (somewhat Anglicised) name of Matthew Ho and when we meet him in the mid-1990s he's a successful businessman running a company making air-conditioning units. Never mind all that hot air (well, cold air) though, what's the story with Tom having a child? Well, you've probably guessed, but it turns out that there was a particularly fraught period early in the Japanese occupation when Tom and Maria were holed up in an abandoned school in the New Territories hiding from the Japanese troops, and Tom decided that the best course of action would be for him to give himself up, Maria herself being just another local as far as they'd be concerned unless endangered by being seen to be harbouring Westerners. Maria attempted to persuade him otherwise by suggesting they get, hem hem, "holed up" in a slightly different way and evidently Tom jumped at the opportunity and then went ahead and gave himself up the next day anyway. 

Matthew delivers some letters from Maria that he'd been entrusted (including the whole explaining that she'd had his child thing) with to Tom and the two establish an affectionate relationship. Over the years his air-conditioning business becomes successful but the impending handover of Hong Kong to China introduces some uncertainty, to the extent that he decides he needs a Chinese backer to avoid the company going under. An opportunity is provided by an introduction to Dawn Stone, now a high-powered executive who's ascended the greasy pole of career advancement partly by her own talents and partly by also regularly ascending Philip Oss's greasy pole. Anyway, Dawn provides an introduction to the people she works for, who are of course the Wo family. Mr. Wo seems receptive and offers some terms that Matthew finds acceptable. Matthew is naturally delighted, but now has to travel to Hong Kong and broach the subject with his grandfather, notoriously not a big fan of the Wo family after their probable involvement with abducting and murdering the woman he loved. Tricky times.

The novel ends before Matthew and Tom meet to discuss the thorny issue of Matthew entering into a business relationship with Maria's probable murderers (or at least people who represent the same organisation), but it seems unlikely Tom will just shrug it off with a heeyyyy, whaddaya gonna do? But who knows? Maybe he's mellowed in his old age. The reader may also find themselves struggling a bit to care much about the fate of an air-conditioning company, at least in comparison to the compelling details of Tom and Maria's wartime adventures. Tom's story is the heart of the book, and the sections featuring Dawn and Matthew which bookend it are much shorter and, to be blunt, less interesting. The sections describing Tom's wartime captivity and the arbitrary indignities he is subjected to are, for obvious reasons, the most compelling bit of the book, and quite reminiscent of Empire Of The Sun. The other book on this list to have Hong Kong as its principal location is Kowloon Tong. 

As always, write about what you know is sound advice, and it turns out John Lanchester grew up (up to the age of about ten) in Hong Kong, and has an evident love for the place. I myself briefly visited Hong Kong in late 1976 and have some hazy memories of it, including a trip on a junk across Hong Kong harbour, which is definitely real as I have photos, and the spectacular approach to Kai Tak airport which is definitely a real thing and where we definitely did fly into and out of, but I couldn't say whether the recollection I have of looking out of the window of the plane during the approach through the Kowloon apartment blocks is real or not.

Anyway, this is all very good, the slight reservations about structure aside. It's also the latest book in this series to carry a map at the front, reproduced below.

peat repeat

You'll recall my frustration at being thwarted in my plans to do a long circular walk in the Black Mountains back in May of last year. As I unexpectedly had a couple of days' leave to use up I found myself at a loose end yesterday and decided to go and have another crack at it. After the extreme fuckery involved with trying to pick out a route up through the forestry last time I decided to keep any involvement with it minimal this time, and not get involved with the area I was in last time at all. 

There are two car parks on the road up the Grwyne Fawr valley, the first being Pont Cadwgan where I parked last time, and the second, further up towards the reservoir, which just seems to be called Mynydd Du (Black Mountain). This is where I parked this time and headed up in a roughly north-east direction to get onto the long ridge just before the summit of Chwarel y Fan, which makes the rather grandiose claim to being the highest point in Monmouthshire. I mean, I daresay it is, but it's not a summit in any real sense, just the high point of the ridge which gradually descends from north-west to south-east. It does have a cairn, though. 

So the first thing you'll notice here is that I'm attacking the walk anticlockwise, rather than clockwise which was the intention last time (not that you'd know from the route map). This is partly because the car park is on that side of the road, partly because most of the clearly-visible paths from near the car park head in that direction (and I was keen to get a fast start and defer any navigational fuckery until later) and partly because my loose rule-of-thumb for walks dictates having the high points (the summits of Waun Fach and Pen y Gadair Fawr) in the second half of the walk. 

Anyway, once on the ridge the route proceeds almost dead straight north-west towards the trig point at the summit of Rhos Dirion (at 713 metres, 2339 feet) - again, a summit in name only as it just marks the point where the long ridge ends and drops off the steep northern face of the Black Mountains escarpment. At this point you turn 90 degrees left along the ridge that heads up over Pen y Manllwyn towards Waun Fach, which, as I'm sure you'll remember from 2010, is the highest point in the Black Mountains. You'll also recall that when I went up it then it was after a period of very dry weather and it was still a treacherous boggy nightmare on the summit plateau. Well, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that the National Park authorities, starting in what seems to have been around 2015, have done some extensive restoration work and landscaping on the top of Waun Fach and the surrounding area, created an understated summit monument (with a little OS logo embedded in it, just so you know it's legit) and laid some paths by dumping what a quick back-of-a-fag-packet calculation suggests must have been SEVERAL GAJILLION TONNES of stone and gravel up there. Before and after summit pics (i.e. from 2010 and yesterday) are below. 

In addition to being able to stand at the summit for a photo without gradually slurping knee-deep into a peat bog, you can now walk along a pleasant gravel path across the summit plateau and (via a bit of down and up again and, yesterday, quite a bit of slightly slippery ice and snow) to the neighbouring summit of Pen y Gadair Fawr, which is a much more satisfying mountain summit but happens to be about ten metres lower than Waun Fach. I don't make the rules. From there you drop off the east face of Pen y Gadair Fawr for a steepish descent back down to the Grwyne Fawr valley. Suspicions of further navigational fuckery which arise as you approach what appears to be an unbridged and unfordable section of river at the bottom of the slope are curtailed as the path takes a sharp right turn along the riverbank to a footbridge which takes you back onto the road and back to the car park. 

Overall, a round trip of around 18.3 kilometres or 11.4 miles, considerably shorter than the original walk would have been (this post suggests the full circuit from Pont Cadwgan via the trig points on Crug Mawr and Bal Mawr is about 20 miles) but more than enough on a chilly February day. Considering the time of year the weather was pretty good - high cloud, no rain - but it was quite windy most of the way round. Not as bad as on this trip up Pen y Fan, but still a bit exhausting after a while.

Back up a bit though, Dave, you'll be saying: what about this whole path-landscaping thing? I'm slightly uncomfortable about that. Shouldn't we just leave the landscape to do its thing without constraining it and making life easier for people? No-one has to go up there, you know; if you don't fancy getting your boots muddy maybe you should just stay at home and do some macrame or something. What next? A train up, like on Snowdon?

I see what you mean, but bear in mind that the previous set of prevailing conditions up on top of Waun Fach in particular - vast expanses of black mud, everyone taking their own route to try and keep their boots dry and trampling all the plant life - was a man-made thing as well, and one of the reasons for constraining people to walk a nice dry path is that now everyone goes the same way, stops eroding the peat and trampling all the wildlife and lets the rest of the summit plateau return to its former state. And what about the paths elsewhere? Would you have those removed as well? It'd make mountain hiking a considerably slower and more tedious business. No, we just have to make the best of the situation we find ourselves in. And, after all, when you think about it, it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot LIKE LIFE.

Route map and altitude profile are below. Open in a new tab for larger versions, as always, and note that the altitudes are 50-odd metres too high. This seems to be a feature of my phone's GPS rather than the visualisation software. 

don't be skirridiculous

Been out for a couple of walks recently that seem worthy of note (hey, it's my blog) so here's the first.

It was my birthday a couple of weekends ago so we headed off up to my parents' place in Abergavenny for tea and cake. On the way I'd decided that we should have a crack at the Skirrid as it's a fairly short walk, I'd only been up there once, twenty-odd years before (on what collective family memory seems to think was Boxing Day 2000, which sounds plausible), and it was a nice sunny day.

Note that this is Ysgyryd Fawr ("big Skirrid"), not to be confused with its little brother Ysgyryd Fach ("little Skirrid") which is nearer Abergavenny, lower, and generally less interesting. The main feature of the big Skirrid is the major landslip which appears to have cleft the mountain in half when you approach it from the correct angle (from the north or south, broadly speaking - the photo below is looking from the north). I should say here that "big" is strictly relative - it's 300-400 feet lower than both of its near-neighbours the Blorenge and the Sugar Loaf. 

It's a pretty straightforward walk and there's a dedicated car park which pretty much constrains your route - we went clockwise round the route shown below which basically means a nice gradual uphill ramble through some pleasant woodland to a perfect lunch spot sitting on some big rocks right in the middle of the cleft of the landslip (the top left corner of the red route). What you would normally do then is carry on and skirt round the north side of the hill and head for the summit by one of the paths that go up it from that side (the major one which carries the Beacons Way approaches from the north-east). However, Hazel's boots - quite a decent pair of Meindl ones, albeit 15+ years old - had decided to throw a spanner in the works by disintegrating and partially shedding their soles. So we effected a makeshift repair with the bootlaces and my trouser belt and sent her and my Dad back along the low-level path to avoid further disintegration. That left me and the three kids, and Nia, sensing an opportunity for some fun, suggested that we just smash straight up the slope in front of us to get to the top rather than messing about with any more low-level walking. 

Needless to say I was up for it, and so too, commendably, were Alys and Huwie, so we went for it. I did manage to persuade them to take a slightly diagonal route rather than attempting to scramble straight up a cliff, and, as usually happens, once you get in close to the slope it's easier than it looks from a distance. We all got onto the summit plateau safely, doubled back, bagged the trig point and then walked back along the full length of the ridge before dropping down through the woods to the car park. A round trip of somewhere between 5 and 6 kilometres depending whose electronic device you believe. Nia's Fitbit gave the higher number but she did a lot of running off ahead and doubling back and occasionally diving off into the woods to climb a tree, which the more sober walker might decide to skip. Anyway as walks of around three-and-a-half miles go it's packed with interest and I recommend it. As you can see from the map there is a low-level path around the other side of the hill as well which you could take, as Emma and Ruth seem to have done here. 

will no-one rid me of this turbulent school

I was inspired by my mention of going to school in West Bridgford in the early 1980s to try and find the two schools I went to. We were only in the area for about eighteen months, and our collective recollection (and I'm leaning heavily on Emma's memory for some of this) is that our school attendance comprised the last two terms of the 1980/1981 school year and the entirety of the 1981/1982 one, which basically means that we moved up around Christmas 1980 and back in the summer of 1982. 

An odd side-note, similar to this (also school-related) one in how it illustrates the slipperiness of memory: I vividly recall being sat in front of one of those old tall TVs on a cart that schools used to have, at my primary school in Newbury, watching (bizarrely in hindsight) a cricket match, which I have mentally filed as being one of the early skirmishes of the 1981 Ashes series but which in fact must have been one of the matches against the West Indies from the previous year. I have equally vivid memories of watching some of the later Tests of the 1981 season in our house in Normanton-on-the-Wolds, which I'm provisionally prepared to accept are genuine, as they at least fit in with the known timeline of reality. The other possibility with the wheelie-TV school cricket anecdote is that it was the 1981 Ashes and I've mentally mis-located it geographically. I don't think so, though.

In fact, bollocks to it, I'm going to do a full list of all the schools I ever attended. Here we go:

• Let's start right at the beginning with Victoria Park Nursery in Newbury - not a school in the strict sense but I would imagine some light learning stuff was probably done in addition to the finger-painting and napping. I mainly include it so that I can also include this tremendous photograph of me (second from right, possibly asleep), my friend Pippa (fifth child from left, in front of the bishop's right knee) and the Bishop of Reading, who I think at the time was a bloke called Eric Wild, although I can't be completely sure as the job changed hands during 1972, which was probably around the time the photo was taken. 

• So then there was St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Primary School, also in Newbury. I'd have gone here during the 1974/1975 school year, just about all of it I think as we flew to Korea around July 1975.
• While we were in Seoul (July 1975 to December 1976) I attended Seoul Foreign School, which I mainly recall being intimidatingly huge (to a five-year-old, anyway) and run mainly by Americans - presumably a legacy of the large military presence dating back to the Korean War and beyond, although that can't be the full story as it was apparently founded as long ago as 1912. It's on Google StreetView, as most things worldwide are, but I can't say I'm struck by an overwhelming sense of oh yeah, that place on looking at it.
• Back to Newbury and St. Joseph's between the start of 1977 and about September 1978.
• Then off to Java and Bandung International School (now apparently called Bandung Independent School and occupying a different physical location), which by contrast with Seoul Foreign School was an endearingly half-arsed educational facility whose teaching staff was largely drawn from the pool of expatriate wives (including my own mother for a while). 
• Back yet again to St. Josephs, up to what I reckon (see above) to have been Christmas 1980 ...
• ... when we moved to the Nottingham area and I started at St. Edmund Campion primary school, or St. Edmund Campion Catholic Voluntary Academy, as it is apparently now named in a not-at-all-sinister way. This would have comprised the last two terms of my last year at primary school, or Year 6 under the current naming/numbering scheme.
• Next up is The Becket School, also in West Bridgford, where I attended for the whole of the first year (again, what would now be Year 7). More on this in a minute.
• Finally, in 1982 we moved back to Newbury and I started at St. Bartholomew's, where I saw out the rest of my school career in relative tranquility after what I calculate to be eight new starts in about the same number of years.

Upon trying to find the two West Bridgford schools on the map I was quickly able to locate St. Edmund Campion, but as hard as I could squint at the location of the Becket on StreetView I couldn't make it tally with my memory. It turns out that that's because it relocated to an entirely new location in around 2010. That's all terrific, and the new buildings are very impressive (if featuring some terrifyingly Goddy exterior decor), but where was the old location? The school's own website is frustratingly vague on the subject and it was only finding this property feature in the Nottingham Post that led me to it. Locate Brewill Grove on the map, drop the StreetView man on the main road looking towards it, and wind the date back as far as it will go - that turns out to be 2008 in this case, but it's far enough - and there it is, just as I remember it. If you apply the same date to the StreetView view at the new site you can see the new school under construction. You can then wind the date gradually forward to see the progression from working school to closed and slightly overgrown school (and a bit of a target for urban explorers, it seems) to half-demolished school to new houses to not-quite-as-new houses with bigger hedges.

The other thing to note about the new-look Becket is that the names of the school houses have changed. In my day there were four: Augustine, Fisher, Gregory, More - I was in More which I'm pretty sure was green. I don't know how new pupils were allocated to houses - I'm pretty sure there was some sort of hat involved, or that may be another misplaced memory. Anyway, the new school has expanded this to six and, in keeping with the new school's exterior decor choices, has really upped the Goddiness factor in a big way by including several people (Edmund Campion among them, but also Nicholas Garlick and Robert Ludlam, clearly taking time out from writing The Bourne Identity) primarily famous for being martyred in spectacularly gruesome ways. 

I mean, I suspect what's actually happening here is that the Goddiness levels in both schools (which I would rate as High on an arbitrary scale that I've just invented) have remained roughly constant since I was there, but that it just didn't occur to me at the time to notice or question it in the same way it does now. St. Joseph's was fairly Goddy as well, St. Bart's less so, and the schools I went to abroad still less. 

cache for questions

Here's a map of a short walk we did with some friends when we went up to Leicestershire to visit them for New Year. We had, collectively, five kids with us, so a twenty-mile route march was out and in any case would have cut unacceptably into drinking time. We ended up performing a slightly complex set of manouevres involving a car in order to ensure that smaller people who didn't want to do the whole walk and might potentially get a bit whingy and risk PISSING ME OFF had an opt-out and in the end it was only three of us (me, Jim and Nia) who did the whole route (around five miles) on foot. 

No claim will be made by me here that this was the most exciting or challenging walk ever, therefore, but I offer it up nonetheless to illustrate that if you're interested in what goes on around you you can find quite a bit to interest and intrigue even on a short, low-level walk such as this.

Start and end point was at our friends' house in Stathern, which I have obfuscated the exact location of just in case anyone decides to go and burgle it. We then walked along the road towards the neighbouring village of Harby before heading north just after the old railway bridge and linking up with the towpath of a disused canal before making our way into Harby, where we had a couple of pints in the pub and then headed back via the more direct on-road route.

Some points of interest along the way: firstly the old railway bridge and the railway it used to carry. This was the slightly cumbersomely-named Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway which meandered its way around Leicestershire in a mainly north-south direction. Its main business was goods but there were passenger services (ending pre-Beeching in 1953), and there was a station serving both villages called, imaginatively, Harby and Stathern, whose approximate location is marked by the purple star on the map. As with any station designed to serve two communities, it was roughly equidistant from each and conveniently accessible from neither. 

As if that were not interesting enough, Nia reminded me to have a look at my geocaching app and see if there was anything in the vicinity. I discovered not only that there was, but that there was one right under the railway bridge - cue a lot of scrambling around until we eventually found it under a log by the side of the northern bridge abutment.

I see I've mentioned geocaching a few times on Twitter before but the only mention on this blog seems to be in this post from 2008 wherein I was a bit sniffy about it. Well, all I can say is that was pre-kids and it's a lot of fun hunting them out with the kids and gives them a little bit of extra impetus to agree to outdoor activities. The link earlier in this paragraph includes details of the app, of which there is a free version more than good enough to facilitate some entertaining hunting; give it a go. Top tip: take a pen with you as quite a lot of them have log books and only the really lavishly-appointed ones have an accompanying pen, still less one that works.

some more fun #geocaching up in #Wentwood woods at the weekend. Alys was very chuffed that her sharp eyes spotted this one before her sister did. also a bit weird that all the Wentwood geocaches have Papa Lazarou in them barking HELLO DAVE at me pic.twitter.com/1k14TDjjat

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 27, 2020

So then there's the canal - this is the old Grantham Canal which ran from, you've guessed it, Grantham, to West Bridgford on the southern outskirts of Nottingham (and where I went to school for a couple of years in the early 1980s - I mean, not in the canal specifically) where it joined the River Trent. It's pretty reedy and silty and overgrown these days though still just about recognisable as a waterway. 

Finally, once we'd squelched along the muddy towpath to Harby we called into the Nag's Head for a couple of reviving pints. They'd evidently done their research and knew we were coming, as they'd facilitated a nice home-from-home vibe by having Brains SA on tap, and very nice too. Needless to say we lingered a while longer then we'd originally planned, so when everyone else piled into the car to head home the remaining three of us had to stumble back along the road in the dark. Luckily the roadside verges were fairly wide and my phone flashlight was just about up to the job of helping us see where we were going and avoid getting killed by occasional speeding cars. While we're on the subject of pubs we also called into the Montero Lounge in Melton Mowbray on New Year's Day for lunch. 

Finally, my mention of Melton Mowbray there reminds me to remind you that if you're visiting the area you will be in the middle of both Melton Mowbray pork pie country and Stilton cheese country, so make sure you eat some. I'm not big on blue cheese but I did ensure I ate a pie while I was there.